A sense of strangeness—the uncanny feeling that reality is unreal—is one of the axes of the Chernov's work.
The other is humor: fierce, bizarre, and seemingly unwitting; a side effect of the surreal scenarios he creates.
carlos
chernov
Carlos Chernov was born in Buenos Aires, in 1953. He began writing poetry in his teens, and continued to do so as he studied Medicine, on his way to become a psychoanalyst. During that time, he wrote his first book, Movements in water, which remains unpublished.
In 1992 he was awarded the Fifth Centenary Award by the Council of Buenos Aires for his short fictions, Amores Brutales (Sudamericana, 1993). The following year he received the award Premio Planeta de la Argentina for his novel Human Anatomy (Planeta, 1993). Later he published The Chinese Conspiracy (novel, Perfil, 1997), The Passion of María (novel, Alfaguara, 2005), Amor Propio (short fiction, Alfaguara, 2007), and The Imperfect Lover, winner of the award La otra orilla in 2008 (novel, Norma, 2008). The novel The soul eater (Emecé, 2011) won first prize for best unpublished novel by the Municipality of Buenos Aires.
His most recent books are The Star System (novel, Interzona, 2017) and Amo (short fiction, Interzona, 2019). In 1999 he taught a class at Johns Hopkins University titled “The Flesh in Argentinian Literature”
He was a Fellow at Civitella Ranieri Foundation in 2010. He has participated as a judge for the Municipality Awards and the National Endowment for the Arts. His work has been translated into English, Italian, French, and Hungarian; and he appears in several anthologies. He currently has two unpublished novels titled: Lord, You made the night too long and natural causes.
BOOKS
CARLOS CHERNOV
El sentimiento de extrañeza, la sensación de que la realidad es poco realista, es uno de los ejes de la literatura de Carlos Chernov. El otro es un humor raro, feroz, pero casi involuntario, que deriva de las absurdas situaciones que plantea.